The Forgotten Room(78)

“I need to see the ruby necklace if I’m going to sketch it. I assume that’s the lump I’m seeing at your neck.”

I relaxed somewhat and unbuttoned the five small buttons that ran from the top of the neck to my breastbone, spreading the material so the ruby could be clearly seen.

“Perfect,” he said, looking at me, his voice strained. He pulled over the bedside chair next to the candle and sat, then began to sketch.

The only sound was that of the mice in the walls and the scratch of pen on paper, and I found it soothing. Soothing enough that I felt my head grow heavy.

“Not yet,” Cooper said. “Let me finish with your face and then you can sleep.” He looked over the clipboard at me. “Perhaps if I talk, it will keep you awake.”

“Perhaps,” I said, giving him a groggy smile, watching how the candlelight softened his face, illuminated the boy beneath the soldier.

“So tell me about yourself. Tell me why you wanted to become a doctor.”

It took me a while to answer, as I realized nobody had ever asked me that question before. “Because I hated feeling so helpless watching my father struggle with lung cancer.” I thought for a moment. “And because my mother encouraged me.”

“How did she do that?” he asked, his eyes focused on the paper in front of him.

“She told me . . .” I stopped, sensing how odd it would sound telling this to someone who hadn’t known my mother and father; hadn’t known that there was always enough love, but how there always seemed to have not been enough for my mother. My father had adored her, and she had loved him, but not in the same way. To me she’d been like a child who’d lost her favorite doll and been left to make do with her second best.

“She told you what?” Cooper prompted.

“She told me to do something with my life that could never be taken from me. To devote myself to something that involved every part of me, including my heart, so that I would never lose it. When I told her that I wanted to go to medical school, she almost seemed . . . relieved.”

The scratching noise had stopped, and I looked up to find him watching me intently. “So you’ve never wanted to fall in love? To have a husband and a home? Children?”

“It’s not that I never wanted any of that. It’s just that I’ve always wanted to be a doctor more. When so many people along the way told me that I couldn’t because I was a woman, it made me want to be not just a doctor, but the best doctor.”

“And you never met a man who made you rethink your choices?”

Not until you. I bit the words back. I wanted him. Yes, I’d finally admitted it to myself. But did I want him enough to give up everything I’d worked so hard for? Not that it mattered. He was promised to another, and my wanting of him was as impotent as a single raindrop in the desert.

I closed my eyes without answering him. “I’m so tired. Are you almost done?”

I listened as the clipboard was placed on the wood floor with a snap, then Cooper’s bare feet as he padded toward me. “Can you move your nightgown off your shoulders? I need to see the ruby against your bare skin.”

“Like in the miniature,” I said, my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth.

“Yes.”

I sat up and pulled one side of my nightgown off my shoulder, knowing if I pulled the other one down, I’d lose the nightgown completely. Our eyes met, our thoughts in tandem.

Very quietly, he asked again, “Have you ever met a man who made you rethink your choices?”

We stared at each other for a long moment, listening to the sound of the candlewick flickering in melted wax and a lone car passing by on the street below.

“Just once,” I whispered, my eyes not leaving his. I reached up to the fabric on my shoulder, but his hand against mine stopped me.

His face was that of a man in pain. “Don’t,” he said, his voice rough. “I can’t . . .” He shook his head. “We shouldn’t . . .”

I lifted his hand with my free one and brought the palm to my lips. Since my decision to become a doctor, I’d never been so sure of anything in my life. “My mother once told me that a lifetime of good enough was a fair price to pay for a single moment of pure happiness. This is my moment. Don’t take that from me.”

With deliberate slowness, I reached up and slid the nightgown from my shoulder, feeling the soft cotton puddle at my waist.

“Kate,” he said, the word filled with wonder, and promise, and the single moments that were meant to last a lifetime.

He cupped my face in his hands and kissed me softly as I pulled him down with me onto the sheepskin blanket, cocooned in the light of the moon where wars and tomorrows didn’t exist, and where one moment could be made to last until the fragile light of dawn.





Twenty-three




NEW YEAR’S EVE 1892


Olive


This time, they hadn’t even made it as far as the attic. The shame of it.

Sorry, Harry gasped into her ear, but she hardly heard him over the noise of her own blood, the thump of her own heart. Sorry: How could he be sorry? Olive wasn’t. She wasn’t sorry for anything, not the hardness of the wall against her back, not the dampness of Harry’s forehead against her cheek, not the stairwell railing that pressed into her hip. Not for Harry’s hands, which held her in place like a double-headed anchor, so that she didn’t float right off into kingdom come.